Politics LIVE: Kemi Badenoch joins Tory leadership race as she vows to restore party hopes – ‘We will speak the truth again’

Kemi Badenoch has launched her bid to be Conservative Party leader.

Writing in The Times, the Shadow Housing and Communities Secretary said the party deserved to lose in the General Election because it was “unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country”.

Announcing her bid to replace Rishi Sunak, the MP for North West Essex wrote: “The country will not vote for us if we don’t know who we are or what we want to be.

“That is why I am seeking the leadership of the Conservative Party to renew our movement and, with the support of the British people, to get it to work for our country again.”

Badenoch has become the sixth Tory to enter the contest, joining Dame Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick in the race to replace Sunak.

Meanwhile, Suella Braverman has confirmed she will not run to be the next leader of the Conservative Party claiming she got the backing she needed to run but has chosen not to.

The MP for Fareham and Waterlooville said: “Although I’m grateful to the 10 MPs who wanted to nominate me for the leadership, getting on to the ballot is not enough. There is, for good or for ill, no point in someone like me running to lead the Tory Party when most of the MPs disagree with my diagnosis and prescription.”

She said the party’s disastrous election result was down to failures on migration, taxes and “transgender ideology”.

The former Home Secretary added: “I’ve been branded mad, bad and dangerous enough to see that the Tory Party does not want to hear this. And so I will bow out here.”

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Jenrick says there will be ‘no deal’ with Nigel Farage if he wins leadership race

The former home office minister told party members that he plans to win back Tory voters who defected to Farage’s Reform UK.

A number of sources claimed that former Tory MP turned Reform UK MP Lee Anderson said Jenrick “would provide the biggest problem.”

Mr Anderson denied this and told The Independent: “None of them worry us. Just look at their majorities.”

Kemi Badenoch says public services will ‘never fully recover’

She wrote: “We will renew by starting from first principles: we can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state and the sovereign duty it has, above all else, to serve its own citizens.

“Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly.

“At the foundation of our renewal, and indeed the reassembly of the Conservative family, is a confident set of principles about how our economy should work, and for whom it should work.”